Generally, osit, the left tend to see, as the saying goes, 'perceived' problems as being nails for them to hammer.
Take what you said here:
...While well-intentioned, these things tend to give Big Business a huge advantage over small businesses, because the big players have big legal departments and the cashflow to comply with this insane level of bureaucracy. Small businesses stand little chance, when in theory, the market should decide.
The very bureaucracy seems to be geared for exactly this. While small business does the bulk of the heavy lifting, they are not able to contain the mounting regulatory requirements that often cripple them. However, it is variegated in terms of problems, which are often addressed by industry (common sense big and small) themselves as 'best practices' and adopted. Be that as it may, the bureaucracy gets involved at the same time, and industry groups consult with the regulators who are drafting legislation, and it is here that although it may sound reasonable, it works in favor of bigger players, as you infer.
In any functioning civil society (forget left/right for a second) somehow a balance is desirable e.g. a capitalist society has some type of commerce and it needs some type of controls to protect society from those who would scam it from both the inside and outside. The very demographics of people, those with a conscious and those without, those with means and those without; the young and elderly for instance, do require some assistance in the basic ways society is structured to give them a leg up. In the past, these latter things seemed more to do with individuals, families and community help, with charity etc. and today it is enacted in law and regulation for the state to supersede, for the public to become reliant on them.
As for unions let's say, having been in and out of them, on the one hand some within will be protected at all costs who otherwise would have been drummed out long ago. On the other hand, business does this to themselves wherein a good business never needs a union and the workers never need the protection of same.
Your medicare points were good ones. Having been a payer in universal healthcare, I now find myself actually not using it and paying for services that I've some personal control of what it is that is being asked for and received. However, when it comes to traumatic cases (accidents or imminent risk of death) some sort of public system comes to bear responsibility; however that is structured.
The thing is, the more you think about such matters, the more our 3D reality seems to collapse, so to speak. There is no solution. The only thing we can do is work on an individual level on the mundane things that are in front of us and make things a tiny bit better over time. If we think about an alternative on the macro level, we would have to think about a world where everyone is responsible on an individual level and strives towards truth and service, i.e. a world where everyone is STO-oriented in one way or another. Now think about what such a society would look like if it developed for a couple of millennia. We have absolutely no clue! This would be another universe entirely!
Yes, on the macro that seems so, to strive for STO orientation. Now, looking around at our 3d plain I'm often amazed that societies can even function as it is personally and externally managed, and as JP points out, in the micro and macro, amazing things take place to keep it all running and the fact that it can be taken for granted – he reminds people of this. That said, however, this also brings up something that Collingwood alluded to while reading Collingwood's IoH (had made a note in the margin on the 'idea of historical progression' that was particular to progress). In this case, Colllingwood brings up the idea of the fisherman. Not sure why, yet my notation in the margin included JP's notion also, as progress can be seen on many levels and it does not make the past that had differences any less viable. The analogy Collingwood used was in improving fish catches - more mechanized, from five to ten fish in this case:
"But from whose point of view is it an improvement? The question must be asked, because what is an improvement from one point one of view may be the reverse from another; and if there is a third from which an impartial judgement can be passed on this conflicts, the qualifications of this impartial judge must be determined.
Let us first consider the change from the point of view of the persons concerned in it: the older generation still practicing the old methods while the young has adopted the new. In such a case the older generation will see no need for the change, knowing as it does that life can be lived on the old method. And it will also think that the old method is better than the new; not out of irrational prejudice, but because the way of life which it knows and values is built round the old method, which is therefore certain to have social and religious associations that express the intimacy of its connexion with the way of life as a whole. A man of the older generation only wants his five fish a day, and he does not want half a day's leisure; what he wants is to live as he has lived. To him, therefore, the change is no progress, but a decadence.
It might seem obvious that the opposite party, the younger generation, the change is conceived as a progress. It has given up the life of its fathers and chosen a new one for itself; it would not do this (one might suppose) without comparing the two and deciding which one is better. But this is not necessarily the case. There is no choice except for a person who knows what both the things are between which he is choosing. To choose between two ways of life is impossible unless one knows what they are; and this means not merely looking on one as a spectacle, and practicing the other, or practicing one and conceiving the other as an unrealized possibility, but knowing both in the only way in which ways of life can be known; by actual experience, or by the sympathetic insight which may take its place for such a purpose. But experiencing shows that nothing is harder than a given generation in a changing society, which is living in a new way of its own, to enter sympathetically into the life of the last. It sees that life as a mere incomprehensible spectacle, and seems driven to escape from sympathy wit it by a kind of instinctive effort to free itself from parental influences and bring about change on which it is blindly resolved. There is here no genuine comparison between the two ways of life, and therefore no judgement that one is better than the other, and therefore no conception of the change as a progress.
For this reason, the historical changes in a society's way of life are very rarely conceived as progressive even by the generation that makes them. It makes them in obedience to a blind impulse to destroy what it does not comprehend, as bad, and substitutes something else as good. But progress is not the replacement of the bad by the good, but of the good by the better. In order to conceive a change as a progress, then, the person who has made it must think of what he has abolished as good, and good in certain ways. This he can only do on condition of his knowing what the old ways of life was like, that is, having historical knowledge of the society's past while he is actually living in the present he is creating: for historical knowledge is simply the re-enactment of past experiences in the mind of the present thinker. Only thus can two ways of life be held together in the same mind for a comparison of their merits, so that a person choosing one and rejecting the other can know what he has gained and what he has lost, and decide that he has chosen the better. In short: the revolutionary can only regard his revolution as a progress in so far as he is also an historian, genuinely re-enacting in his own historical though the life he nevertheless rejects.
Let us now consider the change in question, no longer from the standpoint of those concerned in it, but from that of an historian placed outside it. We might hope that, from his detached and impartial point of view, he would be able to judge with some chance of fairness whether it was a progress or not. But this is a difficult matter. He is only deceived if he fastens on the fact that ten fish are caught where five fish were caught before, and uses this as a criterion of progress. He must take into account the conditions and consequences of that change. He must ask what was done with the additional fish or the additional leisure. He must ask what value attached to the social and religious institutions that were sacrificed for them. In short, he must judge the relative value of the two different ways of life, taken as two wholes. Now, in order to do this, he must be able to enter with equal sympathy into the essential features and values of each way of life: he must re-experience them both in his own mind, as objects of historical knowledge. What makes him a qualified judge, therefore, is just the fact that he does not look at his object from a detached point of view, but re-lives it in himself.
So, JP rightly reminds the students of how ‘hard’ it was going back in time comparatively. He reminds those of the incredible processes involved today (e.g. of them arriving at university by transportation networks and how all the networks are maintained etc.). All this is natural in technological and civil structural advances, however, this also comes back to what Collingwood said of taking “
into account the conditions and consequences of that change.” Did our grandparents say that to us – they experienced both aspects as some of us have now experienced both aspects of our time and today’s time. So, the consequences of these progressions are a factor, and as amazing as the provisions of our time now provides, the advances (here and now) come with the consequences that we see. What of the “leisure” time, what of the uses of progress?
Why bring this up at all, does it matter? I guess in order to see some of that one would have to look at each progress – medicine, agriculture, pollution, complexities of systems (e.g. when they breakdown only a very few can now fix them - has anyone worked on their car these days?), science and technologies for our betterment are often changed to our detriment; weapons systems, financial control, social control and on and on.
So, these were the questions when reading IoH while at the same time thinking about what JP was saying. It is extremely hard, osit, to measure progress as just a better thing when clearly, if experienced, things can be seen progressing in an unhealthy way, too - which you point out. And I think, going back to what you posit of the left, this is where the left's 'progress' relies on them bringing out their hammer at every opportunity (like identity politics) and then dictates the controls needed.